Spidertracks at the start of April released its Early Adopters program for Insights, as part of its most-recent Virtual FDR release. Insights is designed for operators to get information about safety occurrences about a flight without complicated reports or costly installations.
Insights is made possible through Spidertracks’ latest Spider X hardware. Based on the aircraft data collected by Spider X, Virtual FDR Insights will feed both operational and safety insights into an operator’s FOQA program. This device collects critical data such as roll, pitch, yaw, speed and altitude, and delivers the information wirelessly to the Spidertracks platform. This data is then used to deliver actionable information in what the company describes as a simple-to-use format. Insights gives operators the ability to see where and how they are flying.
With Insights, Spidertracks explains operators will have the ability to define and set specific parameters about their aircraft that they want to measure, such as excessive roll, a high rate of descent, maximum altitude, and/or a heading change, to name a few. Insights also comes with reporting tools so operators can analyze, measure, and interpret information such as the location of safety events, percentage of flights with safety events, and trends of safety events by type of event, among others.
“The same barriers exist today in flight data monitoring that existed in tracking when we started,” said Steve Whitaker, Chief Operating Officer, Spidertracks. “The boxes are $20,000 and it’s a 30-hour install. Even the higher-end operators that we speak to can’t justify rolling that out across their fleet. Less than 10 per cent of the market is utilizing [FDM] right now. We have a cost-effective solution that provides an entry to a FOQA program with the basics they need to get an understanding into their safety.
